Democratic Mandate to Repeal Taft-Hartley Act

Election of President Truman and a Democratic Congress on Nov. 2 foreshadowed an early and thorough overhauling of federal labor legislation. Whether the labor vote or the farm vote was primarily responsible for the President's surprise success at the polls, the Democrats were heavily concentrated in the rural South and West, and the election results have been widely interpreted as a mandate to repeal the Labor Management Relations (Taft-Hartley) Act of 1947. During the campaign President Truman and other Democratic candidates called repeatedly for that action, and the labor plank of their party platform led off with the unequivocal statement: “We advocate the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act.”

Democratic campaigners emphasized repeal and no more, but it has been made clear since the election that the Truman administration will not ask the 81st Congress simply to erase the Taft-Hartley Act and rest on a restored and unamended Wagner Act. The President's postwar labor record would have belied any such assumption. The Democratic platform, moreover, recognized a need for additional legislation on labor relations. What is really in store, therefore, is not repeal but revision of the existing law. Although the new Congress probably will go through the form of repealing the Taft-Hartley Act, it will no doubt substitute for it something less restrictive than the Republican statute but more restrictive than the original National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act of 1935.

That the administration was not thinking in terms of mere repeal became plain only two days after the election, when Secretary of Labor Tobin said that passage of a new labor measure, “fair to both workers and management,” would be one of the first recommendations submitted to Congress in January. At a press conference, Nov. 8, Tobin coupled “outright repeal” of the Taft-Hartley Act with its replacement by a “just law” and confirmed that Labor Department lawyers already were preparing suggestions in that regard for the President's consideration.